I intentionally ignore the vast majority of everything on my phone until I can get to a real computer. Phones and tablets feel like unmitigated torture and I loathe it every time I have to use one to do something

It’s not about Trix for those kids… It’s about mocking the rabbit about the privilege they have and which is forbidden to the rabbit.

The cruelty is the point.

I was already out of the country during… the last time bad event happened… and I decided to stick it out and build a new life and get a permanent residence in case things did not improve. And then they didn’t. I just managed to get my permanent residence right before… the current time bad event happened (2024).

The simplest thing I can say is, I don’t regret the decision. I gave up a lot on the journey to my new life, but what I gained is knowledge and understanding of just how much crap you don’t actually have to put up with… how much you SHOULDN’T have to put up with. Some things are worse, sure, but so much has been better for me as well… but one of the big problems I didn’t think about is, the survivor’s guilt is real. For what it’s worth, I don’t think in absolute terms there’s any shame in fleeing. A nation is a societal construct in the first place, and I don’t think you particularly owe anything to the nation you happen to be born in, especially one that shows such utter contempt for its citizens on a daily basis. But the people you know and care about… and the innocent people that don’t have the opportunity you do to do the same… leaving them there leaves a wound, even when you KNOW deep down there is very little you can do personally by virtue of suffering through it with them. I know ultimately, my being here means I no longer pay taxes to support a US government that does heinous things… I no longer work for a company that actively makes the world worse… and I still vote from here, still support those that I believe in to help see change in the system… and I use that as a salve, but the simple reality is I don’t get to be here with a clear conscience. It’s a weakness, and I feel selfish for the choice I made. I don’t know anything about you - perhaps none of this is an issue for you, and I’m not saying it should be, but if you know your own conscience to be prone to this kind of thinking, it is something you should also consider.

Plato approves

I mean… I would expect most happy people don’t really fully appreciate it unless they consciously work on it… our brains are wired to notice pain - we adapt to comfort. It’s why people who already have the world still want MORE.

Also what’s it called when you consider asking others for help, but you watch everyone in your vicinity do everything in a way that’s completely the opposite of how you would, so you HAVE to do it yourself anyway, or else your OCD will cause you more stress than you’ve supposedly been relieved of?

That is true, and I used “bank account” as a stand-in for what I really meant, which is “financial options”. By not spending money, you have the insulation of not panicking when expenses come up, you have more general leverage over your life, and you get the peace of mind that comes with it. Of course, there are better places to PUT it than a bank account.

It’s also a virtuous circle… if you don’t spend, you don’t have as much financial stress, which means you need less distraction to take the pressure off, which means you spend less money on things you don’t really want, which means you save more.

I beg to differ. Time is shaped like this:

You’re missing the fifth panel where it doesn’t bring the joy she thought it would even after she comes to terms with having spent the money.

It’s okay to spend money to be happy.

It’s also okay to sit there with a full bank account, reading a library book, and smiling about how the marketers didn’t get you this time.

I don’t know why we’re still having this discussion. If it were really about security, they’d just legislate standards for limited data collection and connectivity options, assign fines for violations, and verify compliance. If we’re really at the point where Chinese engineers can design tech western engineers can’t reverse engineer or understand, we’re in way deeper trouble than bans will solve.

But by doing that, they’d have to put the same restrictions on manufacturers from “friendly” countries, and that’s unacceptable given lobbying.

It’s strictly protectionism and it’s disgusting.

Laughs in King Sejong

Where ever will we find another market for the best wine in the world?

Don’t forget demanding a Grammy, which Kanye West would then give him.

Let your fingers do the walking!

It’s depressing how much history is going to be lost. Entire movements have been launched on videos that are now private or removed for copyright violations, and now they are gone forever to future historians. Even looking for information or knowledge now… 80% of your results are YouTube videos. All of that knowledge will disappear forever, and it doesn’t even take a cataclysmic event - YouTube’s search is so actively hostile that even if you know exactly the name of the video you’re looking for, you will NOT find it unless it happens to already be algorithm aligned. YouTube is BY FAR a bigger danger to the throughline of history than ANY social media platform.

The simple solution is to just… stop using video so much. Video is riddled with problems as a long term human record, doesn’t scale, increases perpetually in requirements without actually improving quality of CONTENT, isn’t indexable or searchable, isn’t easily translated into multiple languages, not as easily shared, not as easy to back up… Text is not obsolete. It was our main method of information transmission for tens of thousands of years, and NOTHING will convince me that it should be replaced as the primary method.

Again, it’s a human problem. If humans accepted text and images again for the majority of information transfer, the problem would go away.

This was a study to show something we already knew to people who already knew it in the hopes of convincing people who already don’t trust scientific results that we already knew it. It’s the absolute closest possible thing to a total waste of time and effort I’ve ever seen.

Yeah… the very fact this is posted as a youtube video reinforces the point of how far we are from this. The issue is, the enshitified internet is not a technology problem… it’s an education/people problem.

The internet will not be better until people are.